Introduction: Richard Levins on Changing the World

We're trying to create a different kind of world,
one that transforms all aspects of our existence.
       Richard Levins

At a time when the world is facing interrelated, existential crises, it is becoming increasingly clear that humanity must thoroughly recreate its relationships to each other and nature. In this moment of urgency, few activist thinkers are as relevant as Richard Levins (1930-2016) whose writings from decades ago resonate more and more profoundly today. Built into Levins’ wholistic methodology is the injunction "understand the world in order to change it."

As a lifelong activist, scientist, and dialectical thinker, Richard Levins believed that, even if we can't know everything, people can understand enough to act in the world. He advocated "a culture of saying that we should know about the world, that everybody can understand the world, and that it's possible for people who are not professional scientists to be able to deal with questions of science." It's a recurring theme, but one place is in the article "Are We a Weed?" He also insisted on a constant critique of science and, in fact, of all of our ways of knowing the world. While he valued all forms of knowledge, he understood that all are partial and that we necessarily bring our particular biases to them. In his view, errors are to be expected, surprises are to be expected. In fact, they are tocan be welcomed as opportunities to reexamine our old ideas. .

Richard Levins was part of a current in Marxism that understood the importance of the connection between science and politics. Levins and his longtime collaborator, Richard Lewontin, kept an ecological perspective and the dialectical method alive when a large part of the Marxist tradition resisted the ecological view found in Marx and Engels.

In 1985, Levins and Lewontin published their classic work, The Dialectical Biologist. In this groundbreaking book they point out that problems are often larger that we have imagined and we need to extend the boundaries of a question beyond its original limits to embrace both science and politics:

The continuation of hunger in the modern world is not the result of an intractable problem thwarting our best efforts to feed people. Rather, agriculture in the capitalist world is directly concerned with profit and only indirectly with feeding people. Similarly, the organization of health care is directly an economic enterprise and is only secondarily influenced by people’s health needs. The irrationalities of a scientifically sophisticated world come not from failures of intelligence but from the persistence of capitalism, which as a byproduct also aborts human intelligence.¹

Levins’s approach to science and politics is also expressed in the life that he led. While living and working in Puerto Rico from the early 1950s to 1967, Levins was key in the integration of ecological struggles into the anti-colonial struggles that emerged in the 60s. Beginning in 1964, he collaborated with Cuban scientists in the development of ecological agriculture. During the “special period” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was unable to access the fuels, fertilizers and pesticides required by traditional industrial agriculture and, as a result of this work, was in a position to make a significant shift to ecological agriculture.

During the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s, Levins participated in Science for the People, an organization that started as a protest against military research on campuses. As a member, he helped in the challenge to the “Green Revolution” and scientific determinism. He also helped to organize Science for Vietnam which denounced the use of Agent Orange that was causing birth defects among Vietnamese peasants.

These matters and commitments led to Levins to formally reject a recognition that most US scientists would consider the pinnacle of their professional lives, their election to the National Academy of Sciences. His response to the Academy was not to accuse it of betraying science but quite the contrary to recognize that the institutions of science were organized to serve power. And therefore, in colluding with the military-industrial complex, “It is performing its true mission, and he finds that mission repugnant.”² With Levins’s clearly defined scientific and political commitments, little imagination is necessary to consider what he would of have thought of the renewed danger of terminal nuclear war. And, Levins was focusing on another existential threat --the public health crisis-- long before the Covid 19 pandemic focused world attention on the inability of capitalism to safeguard our health. In 1979, he organized a conference entitled "Toward a Strategy for Health and Survival" with the New York Marxist School's Science Task Force that sought to focus more left attention on the issue. n the 1990s, Levins helped form the Harvard Group on New and Resurgent Diseases. It rejected the idea, prevalent since the 1960s, that infectious disease would disappear with economic development. As he stated in his autobiographical article, “Living the 11^th Thesis”:

The resurgence of infectious disease is but one manifestation of a more general crisis: the eco-social distress syndrome, a pervasive multilevel crisis of dysfunctional relations within our species and between it and the rest of nature. It includes in one network of actions and reactions, patterns of disease, relations of production and reproduction, demography, our depletion and wanton destruction of natural resources, changing land use and settlement, and planetary climate change. It is more profound than previous crises, reaching higher into the atmosphere, deeper into the earth, more widespread in space and more long lasting, penetrating more corners of our lives. It is both a generic crisis of the human species and a specific crisis of world capitalism. Therefore it is a primary concern of both my science and my politics.³

This Collection

Reflecting Levins's belief that everyone can and needs to understand the world in order to change it, this collection of articles is drawn from talks and essays directed to a broad audience rather than to just to fellow-scientists or experts. In these articles Levins not only seeks to illuminate a particular topic, but also to demonstrate and provide dialectical tools for penetrating the complexity and scale of the changes we need to address.

Most articles are previously unpublished, out of print or hard to find. Many are drawn from transcripts of talks delivered at the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School where he served on the School's Science Task Force and as a member of its Advisory Board. Several others are drawn from articles and talks from his many years as an activist in the Puerto Rican independence movement. In 1966, he was one of the founders La Escalera, a monthly magazine founded by several professors of the Río Piedras Campus of the University of Puerto Rico that focused on issues of history, politics and militarism. From the early 1980s, he served on the board of the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee and published articles in its bulletin, Puerto Rico Libre.

We have also included a few pieces that reveal the more satirical and humorous side of his personality. One example of this is his poem, "Indo-Semitic Hymn to the Earth" which, in recognition of the directions of writing in these two great traditions, has rhyme at both the left end of the line and the right end of the lines. And, although they both deny it, Isador Nabi, who has been called "undoubtedly one of the most mysterious and controversial (some would say notorious) names in science today," is widely believed to be a pseudonym used by Levins and Lewontin on various occasions.

As to the organization of sections focussed on some of the main areas of Levins's work--"Ecology," "Science & Technology," "Health & Survival," "Cuba and Agro-Ecology," and "Political Practice"-- we have to point out that we are dealing a dialectical thinker. Although the issue is divided into these sections, they are somewhat artificial; rather than discrete themes, separated from each other, the sections are entry points to interrelated topics. Throughout the essays are united by Levins' insistence that “there is no escape from politics...objects can be both biological and social at the same time and, in fact, they are.”